Thursday, October 27, 2011

Republicans 2012: A little Huntsman for the morning coffee

Well, my "morning" coffee, at least. Up late working on behind the scenes web infrastructure.

A couple links and clips devoted to my project to publish every thing I notice and have time to publish on Huntsman... Great appearance by Hunstman on Colbert earlier this week... Here's hoping he gets his bump.

This has been Huntsman's pitch all along: He's the guy who can "do things," even if it means working with, (or, in his case as Obama's ambassador to China, for) liberals.But the pitch isn't selling.

It's not for a lack of conservative ideas. Huntsman's loophole-slashing tax reform plan, which would create three income tax brackets of 8 percent, 14 percent and 23 percent, received glowing reviews from the Wall Street Journal editorial board and FreedomWorks, a Washington, D.C.-based tea party group.

But his tax plan hasn't been enough to get Huntsman out of the basement tier of long-shot 2012 candidates, and Huntsman knows it.

...

"Inevitably, people will insist that the work of the country gets done," Huntsman said in his interview with Yahoo News. "You've got to have candidates who will run and say, I'm going to get the work of the country done, I'm not going to sell out for right or left.""People are going to say, Hallelujah! We've been waiting for this moment to finally get people in there who can deal with debt, with tax reform, energy independence, our wars abroad," he said. "We can only go on like this for long."

"If that wasn't an embarrassment, I don't know what is," Huntsman said. "You had a whole class of my party saying, basically, Go ahead and default. Default?! ...We should have had the 'doer class' who stood up at that point and be willing to say, No, we're not going to let nonsense stand in the way of getting to work.'"That's the role Huntsman wants to play, but at this point, Republican voters aren't trying to cast that part. In New Hampshire, where Huntsman moved his campaign headquarters a few weeks ago and where he spends most of his time, he's polling at less than 5 percent.

New Hampshire residents aren't even donating to his campaign. In the last quarter, Huntsman's campaign reported just two donors in the entire state who gave a combined $1,000.